Bailey.
Rie looked at me quietly with her back against the screen.
“It’s just my goddamn brother with his peptic ulcer,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I was supposed to make a speech to the Lions or Rotary last night.”
“Is that all of it?” Her quiet eyes watched my face.
“Bailey thinks an offense against the business community has the historical importance of World War III.” I folded the telegram and put it in my shirt pocket. “He’s probably swallowing pills by the bottle right now. Do you have a telephone?”
“There’s one down in the beer joint.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Put the wine in the icebox.”
“All right, Hack.”
“I mean, I don’t want the poor bastard to rupture his ulcer on a Sunday.”
“Go on. I’ll be here.”
I walked down the road in the hot light to the tavern. Inside, the bar was crowded with Mexican field hands and cedar-cutters, dancers bumped against the plastic jukebox, and billiard balls clattered across the torn green covering of an old pool table. Cigarette smoke drifted in clouds against the ceiling. I called the house collect from the pay phone on the wall, bending into the receiver away from the noise, then heard Bailey’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Where are you?” he said.
“In a bowling alley. What’s it sound like?”
“I mean where?”
“In Pueblo Verde, where you sent your telegram. What the hell are you doing at the house, anyway?”
“Verisa’s pretty upset. You’d better get back home.”
“What is this shit, Bailey? You knew why I had to leave Friday.”
“The Senator wasn’t very pleasant with her when he called here, and maybe all of us are just a little tired of you not showing up when you’re supposed to. They waited the banquet an hour for you before they called our answering service, and I had to drive to San Antonio at ten o’clock and offer an apology for you.”
“Look, you arranged that crap without asking me first, and you knew when I left Austin that I wouldn’t be back this weekend. So you hang that bag of shit on the right pair of horns, buddy. And if the Senator wants to be unpleasant with someone, I’ll give you this number or the one at the motel.”
“Why do you want to behave like this, Hack? You’ve got all the easy things right in your hand.”
A pair of drunk dancers knocked against me, and then waved their hands at me, smiling, as they danced back onto the floor in the roar of noise.
“I just want a goddamn weekend free of migraine headaches and Kiwanians and telegrams,” I said. “I’ll be back at the office in a couple of days. In the meantime you can schedule yourself for the next round of speeches with the civic club account.”
But he was already off the phone.
“Hack?” Verisa said.
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes against her voice.
“I’m not going to say much to you. I warned you in Houston what I’d do if you blew this for us. I’ve got enough to go into court and win almost all of it. I’ll take the house, the land, and the controlling share of the wells, and you can start over again with your alcoholic law practice.”
I took a breath and waited a moment on that one.
“I should have called you, but I didn’t have time,” I said, evenly. “I thought Bailey would tell you why I had to leave.”
“Oh, my God.”
I started to answer, and instead looked out at the dancers on the floor.
“Why should he have to tell me anything?” she said. “You seem to have a strange idea that Bailey should take care of all your unpleasant marital obligations. He was embarrassed enough apologizing for you last night.”
“Well, I’m a little worn out with people selling me by the pound and then telling me how embarrassed they are for me. And it also strikes me that nobody was ever concerned if I was called out of town by a paying client. Maybe some people wouldn’t get their ovaries so dilated if I was on another case besides a Mexican farmworker’s.”
I heard her breath in the phone, and then, “You bastard.”
I hung up the receiver softly and walked back outside into the sunlight. The road was blinding in the heat, and the noise from the jukebox and Verisa’s voice were still loud in my head. I lit a cigar, sweating, and imagined the stunted rage she was now in. Poor old Bailey, I thought. He would stay at the house the rest of the evening, talking quietly to her while her eyes burned at the wall, and then he would begin to consider all the side streets they could use for my election in November, regardless of what I did in the meantime. He would drink cups of caffeine-free coffee with his ulcer pills, flicking over the alternatives in his mind, and soon he would forget that Verisa was in the room. Or maybe the Senator would phone again, and both of their faces would focus anxiously, their eyes reflecting into one another across the kitchen table, while Bailey’s voice measured out his assurances about my sincerity in the campaign and my deep regret that I wasn’t able to be with the Kiwanians (or whatever) last night. Then they would both wonder if we would ever get to that marble and green island of power where you carried a small, stamped gold key in your watch pocket.
Rie was sitting on the front steps with her back against the porch railing and one leg drawn up before her. She had changed into a pair of faded navy ducks, with the laces on the back, and a rose-flowered silk shirt, and in the shade she looked as cool and beautiful as a piece of dark sculpture. There was an unopened can of Lone Star and a tall, cone glass by her foot. My shirt stuck wetly to my shoulders, and my sunglasses were filmed with perspiration.
“You look like Tom Joad beating his way out of the Dust Bowl,” she said. “You’d better have one of these.”
I sat down beside her and opened the can of beer. The tin was cold against my hand, and the foam rushed up in the glass and streamed over the lip. I took my glasses off and wiped the perspiration and dust out of my eyes, but I avoided looking at her face. There was a broken anthill by the edge of the path, with a deep boot print in one side, and thousands of ants were moving over one another in a hot swarm.
“Was everything cool back there?” she said.
“Yeah.” I drank out of the beer — and squinted my eyes into the bright light. “I’m going to give Bailey a frontal lobotomy team for Christmas. Or a can of alum to drink. He has a remarkable talent for calling up everything bad in a person within seconds.”
I heard her take her cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and rip back the cover.
“He’s not a bad guy. He’s just so goddamn obtuse sometimes.”
“Hack, I’m not pressing you.”
“Then who the hell is?”
“I don’t care what you belong to outside of here.”
I looked at her quiet, beautiful face in the shade.
“I love to be a part of your Saturday morning fishing world and your crazy Indian graves,” she said. “I’d never ask you about anything back there in Austin.”
I took the cigarette from her hand and drew in on the smoke. The trees in the dirt yards along the street were still and green in the heat.
“I put the wine on a block of ice,” she said.
“Maybe we had better drink that, then,” I said. “What do you think, good-looking?”
She smiled at me with her eyes full of light again, and we walked into the back of the house and opened the tall, dark bottle of cold duck. I chipped off a bowlful of ice from the block in the top of the cooler and set it in front of the fan in the bedroom so the wind stream would blow cool across the bed. The sun burned yellow against the window shade, and across the river in Mexico a calf stuck in the mudflat was bawling for its mother. Rie undressed
